


Restoration of Faith

by mari4212



Category: Black Ships - Jo Graham
Genre: F/M, Female Characters, Gen, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-18
Updated: 2012-02-18
Packaged: 2017-10-31 08:45:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/342143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mari4212/pseuds/mari4212
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dreams can be rebuilt out of ruins.  She'd almost forgotten that, before he came.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Restoration of Faith

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to sirutka for the beta-job, and to Jo Graham for writing these characters and then letting us play with them.

He came in autumn, when the grain lay heavy in the fields, because there were too few of us left to harvest it.

My brothers had died that summer, died fighting the Rutoli. For a short time thereafter, I feared that the truest parts of my father had died there too, left in the fields with his sons and the blade that wounded his leg. What I saw when I looked at him was a bitter husk of the man who had once been so big and so fierce in his joy and pride. I hid myself away from him often, in those months, more afraid of the stranger replacing my father and king than of being alone. Truly, there was so much to be done, and too few hands to do it all, that at the time I doubted he knew I was not with him a-purpose.

I heard the alarms in the city, even over the noise of my loom’s thumping rhythm. After that summer, I would never again be able to ignore an alarm raised about strangers outside the walls. I left my weaving room then, and made my way to my father’s main hall. There would I find all the answers that were to be found.  
My father saw me enter and motioned me into the shadows, behind a concealing drape. My grandfather had designed it that way; that an heir could hear and observe without himself being seen. Until midsummer, this space had been the sole preserve of my brothers, the two of them alternating their observations, training to support one another in statecraft. Now I was the only one left out of my household to stand back and watch.

I saw them enter in, King Neas and Sybil. They blinked, as all do when entering a shadowed building from the bright daylight outside. Sybil looked around the room, her eyes catching more than most strangers would. King Neas stared straight ahead, his eyes fixed upon my father’s.

The first words out of my father’s mouth were a challenge, practically an accusation that King Neas was lying to him. My father challenged all strangers when he first met them. It revealed more of their characters, he had told my brothers once while I listened in. He said that how a man responds to a king’s doubt and argument would tell him everything needful about his character.

King Neas was no exception. He responded to my father’s challenge with firm words, but with no excessive anger. Politeness in the face of rudeness was always the sign of a man confident in his own strength, and in total control of his temper, my father had told my brothers and I.

My father had not forgotten his own teachings, swiftly moving from angry challenge to a guarded trust. I leaned in closer as he confessed his dreams of the eagle approaching from the coast, destroying the fox upon our threshold. I was not my father’s confident, and had not heard this dream before. I shuddered at its portents.

King Neas introduced Sybil then, demurring to interpret dreams and prophecy in her favor. I was as startled as my father to hear she was a priestess and prophetess. She had so thoroughly allowed herself to be ignored while my father and the foreign king spoke that I had forgotten the glimpse of wisdom in her eyes.

If she had any great insight into my father’s dream she did not speak it then. Instead the king confessed to the death of his wife, and I saw my father’s eyes spark with a hidden plan, even as he confided to King Neas about the Rutoli and the deaths of my brothers.

I believe he knew before Neas spoke that the foreign king would offer his men to defend us and to rebuild what had been before. My father had always been a swift and accurate judge of a man’s character. Certainly he did not hesitate with his own answer to King Neas’s offer. He began his reply and signaled for me to approach simultaneously. I reached him just as he finished offering me as the final reward for the safe defense of our kingdom. I turned and beheld Neas fully for the first time.

He bowed his head and made his promises again to me, and I did not doubt his word. I had come face to face with my future.

I did not fear it. Like my father, I was swift to judge a man. King Neas had no cruelty in him, that was plain from his words and from the obvious trust that Sybil placed in him. And after the pain and fear of this past summer, he was the first man I’d seen offering a promise of hope, not death. I too wanted to live where young men plowed fields and planted new olive trees, instead of more war.

I looked and saw that future in Neas’s strong shoulder’s, in the faith present in his Sybil’s eyes.


End file.
